


Holtzmann: Chasing Normalcy & Learning Crazy Is Way Better

by idinathoreau



Series: My Childhood Would Have Been SOOO Different With You In It [3]
Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: Childhood Memories, F/F, Mentions of homophobia, abby & erin friendship, basically a lot of flirting and these idiots need to get a clue, birder!Holtzmann, mentions of abuse, platonic otherwise, pre-Holtzbert, pre-movie relationships, runaway!Holtzmann, why do I make this poor little gay suffer?, young Holtzmann
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-01 21:04:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8637985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idinathoreau/pseuds/idinathoreau
Summary: After some gentle prodding, Holtzmann finally agrees to tell a story she hasn’t spoken of for 10 years: her experience as a young, queer engineer set loose upon the world.





	1. Wet birds make great blueprints

In the end, it was Abby who cornered Holtzmann on the stairs from the living quarters the following morning. But Patty and Erin were strategically placed at the kitchen and roof respectively, cutting off the engineer’s typical escape routes. Holtzmann had about four others at the ready (she didn’t waste her 163 IQ points on writing poetry or designing an organizational schematic for the fridge that only she understood) but she refrained from using them when Erin crossed the roof, took her hand and spoke softly to her. 

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to…we’re just curious.” She still had Holtz’s ridiculous braids in her hair from the previous night. 

“We’re not going anywhere, Holtzy…” Abby assured her, panting from chasing the nimble engineer up the stairs. Patty nodded in agreement.

Holtz let out a puff of air. She wasn’t opposed to telling her childhood story. In some ways, she’d already let the most interesting bits of her upbringing slip in her random anecdotes. It was just the period of her life from age 14 to age 16 that bothered her. She had not spoken about it for nearly ten years. But maybe…She took a deep breath. Maybe it was time to let it be told. On her terms. She had taken too trusting these women faster than anyone ever…well except perhaps Reagan…

She shuddered at the memory but pulled herself together. She could do this. 

“Alright. But I warn all of you.” She paused dramatically, her eyes sweeping the assembled team. “My tale is not all fudgy kittens, ghost chasing, and relentless teasing…or inopportunely-placed yam carvings.”

She waggled her eyebrows at Erin, who glared at her but without malice. 

“My story is a bit…wetter.”

Abby rolled her eyes, Patty groaned, and Erin flushed cutely. Holtz winked then settled herself down on the deck chair.

“Once upon every March ever, it was a dark and stormy morn in central Massachusetts…”

***

It was raining again.

Great. Fourteen-year-old Jillian Holtzmann poked her head out of her sopping-wet tent and groaned. 

Perfect.

Trust Mother Nature to royally fuck her over.

She wriggled out of her shelter, her long limbs already riddled with goosebumps and her shirt stuck to her skin with rain. She’d picked the wrong campsite after all. The land was high enough but the trees overhead had dumped accumulated water on her rather than divert it like she had hoped. Her shelter was little more than a pool.

“Fuck.” She peeled the shirt from her body, beating her fists against her sides to warm her skin up. Then, because she was standing in the rain anyway and she hadn’t seen a proper shower in a week, she tilted her head back and let the rain soak her hair. Plucking her one bar of unscented soap from its plastic baggie, she lathered up and rinsed as quickly as the rain allowed. Much better.

Shaking like a dog, she dove back under her tent and dug for her pack. The top layer of everything was soaked but further down she found something that felt dry. Now shivering in earnest, she sacrificed one half-damp shirt to dry her body and hair and bundled herself up in a thick flannel, dry cargo pants and her tattered windbreaker, which was wet but would still serve its intended purpose.

Finally warming up, she sat under the tree and devoured her breakfast: half an oatmeal raisin cookie stolen from an outdoor restaurant two days ago. While she ate, she stared at everything she owned and wondered just what the hell she was doing.

The young teen was squatting in a riverside park, using a leaky piece of canvas for a tent and carrying her belongings in a ratty old rucksack. She had no idea what this park was even called, having hopped the fence into it late last night. It was rather nice though: the deep riverfront was the main feature, with several large trees and manicured lawns dotting the shoreline. Mountains rose in the distance, enclosing it all in a valley. She would have liked to stay longer if it didn’t mean needing to run from the police.

For the second time in as many days, Holtz was struck with the fear of not knowing what was coming next and tried hard not to panic. The unknown was supposed to be exciting.

It had seemed like such a bad-ass thing to do; run away . Now, she wasn’t so sure. For the first few nights it had been fun: taking the bus further than she’d ever gone, pitching a make-shift tent every night with an old piece of canvas she’d found, scrounging for food in dumpsters. But after three consecutive days of rain, a little voice in her head had popped up.

_You cant do this Jillian, go home. Beg for forgiveness. Be normal for them._

She shook her head like a dog, pounding her fist into her temple until that voice shut the fuck up. _Holtzmann_. She reminded herself firmly. _Jillian is not who I am anymore_.

She wasn’t the Jillian who wore dresses to church on Sunday. She wasn’t the Jillian who didn’t cuss or chop her hair short enough to look like a boy. She wasn’t the Jillian who was a perfect, white-bred, blushing schoolgirl. She wasn’t the Jillian who was terrified every day and wanted to turn around and run back home, pretending to be something she wasn’t just to be accepted.

Holtz hated Jillian right now. Jillian was spoiling this adventure for her.

Something let out a series of notes above her head and she glanced up, instinctively searching the branches above her as rain pelted her face. About three feet above her, she spotted the singer and grinned. 

“Huh, nice to see I’m not the only one getting wet this fine morning.” She raised her cookie to the bird, a tiny little golden-crowned kinglet. “Happy tweeting!” She shoved the rest of the cookie into her mouth, still watching the bird.

The kinglet chirped, tilted its head at her, then took off for a neighboring tree. Holtz followed its gaze hungrily. 

Not for the first time, Holtz wished she had thought to grab her binoculars before fleeing her parents’ house in the dead of night. In the haze of packing, she had thought them to be too heavy for hobo life. But that hadn’t stopped her from taking her Walkman-radio, the bag of tools, and about 3 dozen batteries. Well, maybe if she could find some old glasses, she could make herself a pair. 

Holtz stood, watching the bird until it flitted out of sight beyond the wooded edge of the park. She sighed as it went away, making a mental note of where she’d seen it before remembering she had no idea where she was. Engineering may be her first passion but the birds and animals held a close second. Someday when she had her own place, she swore she was going to have at least four pets.

Well, it was probably about time she got moving too. It was just after dawn and that meant local police officers would be scrounging around, looking to roust riff-raff like her from public parks. Holtz crawled back into her tent and scooped her belongings into her pack. She’d have to find some way to dry them later…maybe she could find some loose change and visit a laundromat. Fat chance of that.

Holtz sighed, hefting her pack. The rain continued to pound down on her, flooding her army boots. Her stomach grumbled, clearly not satisfied with the meager breakfast she had had. A sense of fragility gripped her. What did she do now? What did a young, queer teen set loose upon the world do? She couldn’t go back home, not if she ever wanted to be herself. But she couldn’t keep wandering aimlessly around the mid-Massachusetts area. What was she supposed to do?

Through the pouring rain, something new caught her trained ear: a quiet and curt _peep_. She perked up. It couldn’t be…

Except it was. There was nothing else it could be. Holtz raced towards the river, her eyes frantically scanning the shoreline. When she laid eyes on her bird, she nearly started sobbing.

It was a piping plover, fluffing itself up in the rain and looking just as tired and ratty as Holtz herself did.

Holtz let out a breathy laugh of relief. “What are you doin’ here little lady?” She inquired of it. “You lost?”

The plover offered no answer, merely shivered to shake off the rain and peered at her almost accusingly. It must have been blown off-course by this freak storm. 

Holtz crouched, trying not to startle the bird. She knew it was dumb, but she couldn’t help feeling an odd sort of kinship with this particular bird. Piping plovers were rare, fragile shorebirds. Their lifestyle made them very susceptible to death from predators or from the sea wiping out their nests. They were small but they took on the world without fear. Every year, they flew the length of the eastern seaboard from beach to beach. And no matter what the world threw at them, they just kept being them, even to the point of extinction. This one in particular. Here it was miles from the sea, yet, as Holtzmann watched it, she couldn’t help but think that it knew exactly what it was doing.

Just another lone woman, setting out upon the world.

She watched the plover until the rain lessened slightly. Encouraged by the shift in weather or just whatever it is that makes plovers migrate, the little bird spread its wings and took to the sky. It flew up the river, heading northeast, beating its wings against the wind as it fought its way home.

Holtz shouldered her pack and squared her shoulders. In her mind, the decision had been made. She headed north, following the flight. Following the plover. If she couldn’t be herself, she’d settle for being a plover.


	2. An Explosion of Sexual Proportions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Young Holtzmann arrives in her 'promised land'...and discovers more there than she anticipated.

Boston was a welcome relief to the unpredictability of rural Mass. No one looked twice at a scrappily dressed teen with an unlit cigarette perched between her lips and an overflowing rucksack on her back.

She’d only been to the city once before, long ago when her family had taken a trip to explore the Freedom Trail. Now, Holtzmann was paving her own freedom trail. 

Holtz had long since lost track of her plover friend but Boston did seem the perfect place to settle in for awhile. It had plenty of alleys and corners to park herself in, overflowing dumpsters to pick through and endless entertainment in the form of pigeons and people struggling to interact. She did miss some of the country birds though. Holtz often found herself whistling as many of the bird songs as she could recall, creating little tunes for herself when her Walkman ran out of batteries. 

She spent most of her first week admiring everything Boston had to offer the wayward traveler: tall buildings, revolutionary war-era houses, riverfront parks and seashore charm. The glare off of many of the buildings did agitate her though, she had to keep blinking or take occasional breaks from staring for too long. Maybe it would be worth spending the last of her money on a cheap pair of shades… 

Her home became a vacant spot behind a dumpster near the Liberty Hotel. She found a safe spot to tuck her pack, a nice view of the river and set to work making it feel more like home. Her canvas tarp that had betrayed her way back in the park was practically shredded now. It was nearly useless as a blanket.

Holtz learned this the hard way when night fell and the early spring off-shore breeze off of the Charles River snatched heat from her at an unprecedented rate. She had no luck digging anything warm out of the dumpster but she did find several old bedsprings and several choice electrical components. 

Jillian was screaming in her head again, wanting to go home, wanting food and security and warmth. Holtz was having a hard time ignoring her.

But then an idea dawned on her and she set to work. 

One of the only things Holtz regretted about how she had left home was the bag of tools she’d stolen from shop class. They weren’t much, but she felt like she needed them. Her small felony now appeared to have saved her life. She had her tools. And that was all she needed to engineer some kind of heated blanket from this mess of coils, canvas, and Walkman batteries. 

She spent her first night forcing her numb fingers to engineer her safety.

***

Hunger was a real problem. Holtz solved it most days by working so hard on whatever she was building that she forgot her need to eat. 

She had logically assumed that being in a city — where there were more people, restaurants, and convenience stores — would mean a cascade of readily-available grub for the starving queer teen taking on the world. 

What she hadn’t counted on was competition.

She was far from the only homeless person in Boston and most of them were tough old women or sneering men who looked at her like she was a piece of prime meat they wanted to rip apart. Dodging them became a necessity. 

There were other teens too, most of them appearing to be trans men and women or homeless gays who had similar lots in life to her. They all seemed to know each other too; often a group would gather by a favored dumpster and chat amicably. Holtzmann was too shy to try and introduce herself, especially around some of the girls there. 

She was pretty sure they were all gay and most of them were quite attractive considering they lived in squalor. For poor, young, half-closeted Holtzmann, they seemed like goddesses. 

On this particular day though, Holtz knew she would have to either get in there or risk the dives preferred by the creepy older men. She hadn’t eaten in a little over a week and she’d actually made it to the dumpster behind the good diner just in time for the evening trash dump.

The group was somewhat smaller tonight, giving her courage to approach and poke her head into the dumpster. The smell of day-old fish and chips was enough to make her mouth water uncontrollably. She tried to heave herself closer to the tantalizing morsels while drawing as little attention to herself as possible.

“Ayy, you! I haven’t seen you around here before.” Startled, Holtz slipped. She fell out of the dumpster and sprawled undignified on her ass.

She looked up at a six-foot tall queen. The girl was slim and brunette, her eyes an intoxicating shade of green. She held herself with all the regality of an oil magnate and the grace of a doe. Her smile revealed perfect teeth hidden by plump, sinfully kiss-able lips. She shifted, her hair glistening under the streetlights and the misting rain. For some reason, Holtz was reminded instantly of iridescent starlings that had flocked near her parent’s home.

“How are you doin’ there gorgeous?”

Her thick Boston accent was even more intoxicating than her eyes. Holtzmann found herself swallowing hard and stuttering when she replied: “H…Holtzmann. Call me Holtzmann.”

The queen smiled back at her. “Reagan.”

Like a moth to a flame, Holtz was transfixed.

***

Holtz followed Reagan around like a duckling. The girl was quite simple, otherworldly. When she saw Holtzmann trying to scrounge food out of the dumpster with the others, she shook her head and gestured for the young engineer to follow her. Meek and hungry, Holtz padded after her.

She followed Reagan to a bar, a dark, seedy place where she let a strange man fondle her breasts and in exchange, devoured a basket of wings and chugged two beers for free. Later, in the alleyway, Reagan pressed her up against the dirty wall and taught Holtzmann sinful things she had never imagined a tongue could be capable of. 

After that night, Jillian was well and truly gone. There was no going back. Reagan had taken over. 

***

Holtz spent close to the next year in a haze of blissful freedom.

After her rough start, she finally had the sense that her life wasn’t about to implode around her, leaving her desperate and crawling back to her parents or dying in the streets. She knew where to get food, where to sleep so she stayed dry and (most importantly) where to get the things she needed to create.

That was another aspect of this freedom: the ability to build things constantly without supervision, without someone telling her it couldn’t be done or nagging her to do other things. She was limited only by what people threw away, which, quite honestly, gave her a rather wide scope. 

Her constant tinkering, smashing, and planning was a source of great entertainment to Reagan, if only because she enjoyed forcing Holtz away from it for periodic breaks for sleep, sex, or wandering down to their bars. Holtz was reluctant to go every time; anytime away from whatever she was working on only made her thoughts swirl more, her hands itch and her eyes hurt more than they did on a regular basis. Reagan — or rather, Reagan’s tongue — was very persuasive though. 

So Holtz dealt with her inner turmoil silently, because Reagan was warm when the nights were cold. And even though half the things Holtz constructed for her seemed to vanish without explanation, her kisses were enough to make Holtz not care. 

And the sex! The sex was incredible. For horny baby-gay Holtz, Reagan was a dream partner: aggressive, dominating, and demanding. Everything useful she knew about sex, she learned by fucking Reagan.

Reagan wasn’t shy, something that Holtz was trying desperately to emulate. She wore her sexuality like a beauty pageant sash and dared anyone to talk to her like it wasn’t the single greatest thing about her. Watching Reagan flirt at bars was the greatest lesson in picking up women Holtz had ever received. And even though she never got a chance to try them out (for all her casual flirtation with strangers, Reagan was very possessive), she stored all these observations away in the limitless corners of her mind for future reference. 

They hit up bars when they had to, letting drunk men grope them in exchange for free food, booze, or just straight-up cash. They had the hustle down to a science: one was the gropee, the other was the girlfriend who pulled them out before men got too much. If they finished off the act with a steamy kiss, sometimes the groper just handed over his wallet and they took what they wanted. 

They kept a stash of their money in a brown paper bag under the old mattress they slept on behind Copley Place Mall, dreaming of their new life once they had enough to get off the street. Reagan’s voice filled the moments just before Holtz drifted off to sleep, spinning a future of them sharing a cheap studio apartment; one with a window, a large bed and plenty of room for Holtzmann to do her “crazy creating.” Holtz used these whispered plans and promises to steady herself on the nights Reagan didn’t pull her away early enough and strange men stuck their tongues down her throat or their fingers between her legs. Reagan loved her and they were going to build a life together. That was all she needed.

It was like a fantasy, a beautiful dream that she never wanted to end. But dreams are such fickle things and they implode without warning, leaving the dreamer cold and confused, the illusion shattering as they wake from sleep.

Which was exactly how Holtzmann felt when she awoke to a cold mattress one morning in late November, nearly everything she owned gone and Reagan missing. 

She never did learn why Reagan left. When she did think about it, she blamed the handsome guy at the bar who always got a little too close to Reagan, whose hands wandered a little too far. He was a constant recipient of Reagan’s flirtations and a flasher of many crisp bills. Reagan had always giggled when his hands went up her skirt. Holtz had feared him taking her away, but her paranoia had always been soothed by the fact that Reagan shared a bed with her every night.

Now, for whatever reason, Reagan had left her alone with nothing more than a lighter and her old heated blanket. Their money stash was gone, their food stockpile, most of her clothes, her beloved Walkman…But the real blow was the missing shop bag. All of Holtz’s tools were gone, the last piece of her identity.

She supposed she had cried. It would have been hard not to. But her rage had tainted her memories, leaving parts of it spotty. 

She remembered breaking into a RadioShack and pilfering several dozen lithium batteries and an industrial can of hydrogen. She remembered trying to make a rudimentary welding torch out of said gas and a lighter. She remembered her eyes (which had only gotten more sensitive to light and glare since she’d arrived in Boston) betraying her as she struggled to make something out of trash.

She didn’t remember the explosion or the liquid drops of metal burning her skin.

When she woke up on Rebecca Gorin’s couch three days later, it felt as if everything since that lost plover in the park had been a dream.


	3. A yellow-tinted upgrade, some assembly required

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Holtzmann meets Doctor Gorin and begins to rebuild her life after Reagan's betrayal.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we've reached the end of this trilogy! Thank you all for the comments, kudos, etc.!
> 
> Keep an eye on this series though... _birder!Holtz_ has struck my fancy and I may do some more stories with her. I may also tack on a Holtzbert epilogue because I feel bad that they never got their chance among all these flashbacks and this story was severely lacking detailed explanations of Kate McKinnon's hotness.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

When she thought back on how she became an engineer, Holtz considered herself infinitely lucky that her unique madness had not been squashed out in its budding stages. 

Holtz was hyperactive for most of her childhood. In kindergarten, all she had wanted to do was play with blocks, stacking them over and over, higher and higher until they tumbled over. Elementary school was worse. Needing to sit for multiple hours straight was physically painful for the young Holtzmann. She _needed_ to be moving, she needed to do something with her hands. 

Her parents had been ready to put her on Ritalin when they received yet another complaint from the principle that Jillian was disruptive in class. But the day before they were supposed to start treatments, something shifted in their daughter. She was calmer, more focused. She was just as rambunctious but she had a purpose to her energy now, something to think about and apply herself to. She was also coming home with pockets full of screws, nails, washers, and bolts on a regular basis.  
Confused, the Holtzmanns called the school and spoke directly to Jillian’s teacher, trying to figure out where such a change had arisen.

Mrs. Albertson had been watching Jillian for some time, trying to figure out the enigma of the bouncing, fiddling girl in her classroom. One day, on a whim, she had taken the girl to her first shop class. Usually reserved for the 5th and 6th graders, the shop was full of large tools, sharp saws, precariously-stacked heaps of wood and metal parts. This whole mess was supervised by a curmudgeonly shop teacher who generally let the students run amuck so long as no one got hurt. Little Jillian Holtzmann was in heaven. 

She started going once a week, usually during recess. Eventually, she was spending every recess period in there and sneaking away from a few gym periods as well. Within two weeks, she had graduated from the potato clock to basic circuit boards. By the end of her first year, she had stripped the wires from half of the shop walls to construct a massive neon light (no one knew where she got the neon gas…) reading: “Respect your tools”: a favorite phrase of the shop instructor. She would have been expelled if the shop instructor hadn’t been so flattered. The sign had begun a long friendship between the two of them as Jillian progressed through elementary and middle school, dominating the shop class. He’d recommended her to the high school shop class and the advanced physics courses. So by freshman year of high school, young Holtzmann had been taking junior-level physics and college-level shop classes. Holtz had excelled in all of it and quickly moved beyond the syllabus and recommended projects. She was brilliant but reckless, and her teachers saw this as a cause for concern rather than celebration.

Her final report card before she’d come out to her parents and unceremoniously dropped out to live life on the streets had this to say: Jillian will either change the world with her knowledge and imagination…or she will kill herself and many others trying. 

Cocky teen that she was, Holtz had never expected that to come to pass. Conquering the street life of Boston had warped her sense of invulnerability and potential. She had convinced herself that she could not fail.

When she woke up on a stranger’s couch covered in a range of 1st to 3rd degree burns, she finally realized just how stupid she had been.

“You’re awake.”

She tried to turn her head but found the motion to be incredibly painful. Holtzmann groaned, her entire body feeling hot and scratchy, her throat drier than a circuit board. 

A glass of water was tilted to her lips and she drank greedily.

She slid in and out of consciousness all day but the woman was always there when she awoke, a glass of water, a soothing cream, or a gentle hand on her forehead. 

“W..where am I?” Holtz finally managed to ask the fourth or fifth time this happened. 

“You’re in my house.” The woman replied. “Lying on my couch covered in burns you got trying to use a lighter to weld together a heating coil. I trust you’ll never do anything quite so foolish again.” 

Holtz groaned as she slowly sat up. “I cant promise that…I’m full of foolish ideas.” Finally sitting, she got her first look at the woman who had cared for her. Her first impression was that she looked like a sour first-grade teacher who didn’t care for any kind of fun or antics. But then she saw the tell-tale scars and burns of a welder on the woman’s hands and reasoned that she couldn’t be all that bad.

The woman had auburn hair and hazel eyes rimmed by sturdy glasses. She was slim and pretty but had an air about her of complete detachment from emotion.

“How’d you find me?” Holtz asked. The last thing she remembered was being in some east-side alleyway with the lighter and scraps of metal. 

“It’s a long story.” The woman responded disinterestedly. “What I would like to know is this: who are you and why are you on my couch?”

“Uhhh…” Holtzmann was taken aback. _She_ wasn’t even entirely sure why she was on this woman’s couch. “I…I’m Jillian…Holtzmann! My name is Holtzmann.” She clarified quickly, horrified that the old name had slipped out. “And I’m guessing I’m on your couch because…you carried me here?”

“Hmmm…” The woman pondered her answer, leaning back slightly. “As you have introduced yourself and you don’t seem liable to rob me blind and smother me in my sleep, I suppose the polite thing to do is to introduce myself: I am Dr. Rebecca Gorin. You are in fact here because I carried you but mostly because I wanted to know why you were attempted to weld in such a dangerous way.”

Holtz blinked, trying to think back. “I uh…I was mad…” Thoughts of Reagan came crashing back and bile welled up in her throat. “I…I needed to build something…couldn’t see…didn’t have a torch…” Other then that, the details were escaping her. 

“So tell me…” the professor said. “What brings a young lady like yourself to Boston?”

“A rare plover.” Holtz replied, completely deadpan. 

Dr. Gorin raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Yup. Little gal came up to me in a park and convinced me to follow her north to the promised land.”

To Holtzmann’s surprise, the woman only smiled and nodded, as if in contemplation. 

“I see…”

She thought a little longer, this time staring unsettlingly at Holtz as she contemplated. Vaguely, Holtz wondered if her answer had tipped off this woman that she was insane. She wondered if she even cared. 

“Jillian.” Dr. Gorin finally said. Not a question, just a statement.

Holtz flinched. “Please…don’t call me that.”

“If your name is Jillian, I will call you Jillian.” The professor replied, standing up. She patted Holtzmann’s head and walked away.

Holtzmann blinked, more than a little confused. “Uhh…yeah, sure.”

She drifted back to sleep sometime later.

***

Holtz was thrilled to learn that not only did Dr. Gorin have tools and scraps of metal stashed nearly everywhere around her house (as well as, she was surprised to see, a few of Holtz’s own pieces from her time on the streets), but that she taught engineering courses over at MIT. The young teen peppered her with questions constantly, her burned hands itching to apply the things Dr. Gorin taught her while she was confined to the couch. 

Holtzmann’s burns healed quickly under Dr. Gorin’s care and a steady diet of Pringles and fresh produce. She returned to engineering the same day she was able to hold a hammer without wincing. One thing that refused to clear up however, was her eyesight. Holtz had hoped that the lingering dizziness she felt when looking at sunlight or her need to blink when working with reflective metal would fade as surely as her burns did. But it did not. Her work was constantly stalled by this and she was frustrated that her own eyes were preventing her from achieving everything she wanted to do. 

It wasn’t until Dr. Gorin tapped her on the shoulder one day when she got home from work (Holtz having been pressing her fists into her eyes to force them to focus on the toaster she was taking apart) that Holtz realized the professor had noticed as well.

The professor dangled something in her face. “Here, try these.”

They were a simple pair of glasses with thin metal frames, goggle-like rims, and flexible wires. But the lenses were a brilliant shade of yellow.

When she put them on, the world sharpened behind the lenses again. Glare lessened and that annoying need to blink every ten seconds faded, leaving Holtz free to work on her latest crop of pet projects for hours on end without needing any breaks.

She had expected Gorin to be happy that she’d optimized the cycle speed on the dishwasher. But instead of praising her, the professor took one look at her work and said: “you didn’t recalibrate the soap dispenser correctly. Fix it.” Then walked away.

It took Holtz three days and fourteen different changes to gain Dr. Gorin’s approval on the dishwasher. By the time she’d moved on to the washing machine and dryer, she was acing every repair the professor suggested. 

The two of them bonded over unexpected things outside of engineering: their mutual love of 80’s music and Pringles, their polarizing views on whether or not Dijon mustard was an acceptable condiment for fish, their general distain for men.

Holtz did eventually end up telling Gorin the story of Reagan, glad that the professor studiously ignored her tears. She was surprised to find that the professor had been similarly screwed over by an ex-husband who had taken everything from her in the divorce. She’d rebuilt herself and her life from nearly nothing.

“Screw them.” Gorin said with surprising bite as she finished the story. “They may have used us and left us high and dry but that doesn’t mean people like you and me are done. We keep going. We keep working. And if anyone tries to take advantage of us like that again, we say: “Screw You!” loud and proud!”

It was the most animated Holtz had seen the professor up to that point. Usually she was constantly disinterested and nonchalantly dry. 

That conversation stuck with Holtz more than she cared to admit. Part of her wanted to be hurt and continue to hate the world after what Reagan had done to her. But Rebecca’s words were powerful and she found new purpose in them. So what if she’d been hurt? She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t that scared little girl in the park anymore. Nothing was going to stop her from building and living. 

It seemed like such an obvious realization that she marveled how Dr. Gorin had needed to spell it out for her. 

So the next day, she poked around until she found Gorin’s welding torch and fearlessly set about making something to thank the woman properly.  
Gorin found her in the basement just as she finished. 

“Tada!” Holtz held out the pendant for her: a single screw welded diagonally to a piece of metal shaped like a ‘U’. She’d fashioned it into a pin, knowing that Rebecca often wore pins in her lab coat.

Dr. Gorin stared at her for a second with an unreadable expression. Then she came over and took the welding torch out of Holtz’s hand. For a second, Holtz was crushed, thinking her joke had been in bad taste and her gift had been spurned by this incredible woman. But then Dr. Gorin lit the torch with a smile and picked out one of the screws Holtz had rejected. 

“Now what good will that be to me unless you have a matching one?” She asked.

Holtz grinned as her world became just a little brighter.

***

A few days after the pendant exchange, Holtz was interrupted in her self-appointed task of dismantling every appliance in the entire kitchen and rebuilding them so they worked on less power by Dr. Gorin slamming a thick paperback textbook onto the kitchen table.

“Jillian, I have a proposition for you.” She said with no preamble whatsoever. Holtz was used to it though. She pulled her goggles up, letting them nestle in her crop of hair. 

“Okay…sup?”

Dr. Gorin gestured for her to sit. “You cant live with me forever.” She began before Holtz had even lowered herself into a chair.

Holtz froze, anxiety crashing over her as the day she had subconsciously feared had apparently finally come. “I…I know.” She admitted, her head falling to her chest. She wondered what she had done to finally make Dr. Gorin kick her out. It must have been when she set the rooftop grill on fire. Or that time with the salad shooter… 

Dr. Gorin snapped her fingers at her, jolting her out of wondering which of the fires she had set had been the final straw. “Wait. Hear me out.”

She pushed the book towards Holtzmann. Pulling her goggles back down over her face, Holtz peered at it.

“What’s this for?”

Gorin tapped the front cover. “This is for your GED. Obviously you don’t really need it but that’s the minimum MIT requires for application to the 5-year masters program. That, and a sufficient application project.”

The weight of what the woman was suggesting hit Holtzmann like a ton of bricks. Tears pricked her eyes. “Dr. Gorin…”

As usual, the professor had none of that emotional nonsense. “You have two months until the application deadline for MIT.” She informed Holtz. “Your GED exam is in two weeks. Study up.” She tried to leave the room without ceremony after that but Holtzmann practically launched herself across the table to grab the older woman in a tight hug. 

Needless to say, Holtz aced the exam, only needing minimal preparation. For her MIT application, she submitted a new prototype of the electric blanket she had begun constructing while living on the street. This version was assembled safely from materials she pilfered from some of her old dumpster haunts. She was accepted almost immediately (she had a hunch Gorin had had something to do with that) and began her dual degrees in engineering and experimental physics the following fall on a partial scholarship. Her 16th birthday was that same fall. Gorin gave her a welding torch of her own as a present.

But Gorin hadn’t been done there. After a formal interview for posterity and a trial project, Gorin allowed Holtzmann a position in her lab on a stipend. It wasn’t glorious but it was enough to cover a small dorm room on campus and pay for some of her meals. Holtz wasn’t complaining. She’d lived off of less and working for Dr. Gorin gave her access to materials and tools she’d never dreamed of handling. MIT nurtured her madness and gave her a cradle to continue the education she’d always dreamed of. She flew through the 5-year program in 3 years.

When she thought back to that scared 14 year-old in the rain, Holtzmann always had to stop and remind herself that this wasn’t a dream. The worst years of her life were finally behind her. 

***

Holtz finished her story and looked up at the women who had come to mean so much to her since those desperate years of her life. 

Sometime between talking about her life on the streets of Boston and Reagan’s betrayal, Erin’s hand had slid into her own. The physicist kept stroking her knuckles calmingly, seemingly without really realizing she was doing it. The touch was soothing to Holtz, keeping her grounded enough to let her emotions flow freely, instead of trying to sugar-coat her tale with her trademark humor. She could feel the tear tracks on her face where her tears had slipped out under her goggles but she didn’t want to let go of Erin’s hand to wipe them away.

Abby was giving her a strange look: intense in the eyes but soft in the rest of the face. Without saying a word, she crossed the roof and stood right in front of Holtz and Erin. Leaning forward, she buried her face in Holtz’s shoulder and hugged both her and Erin in a tight embrace. Holtz stiffened for a moment then relaxed instantly, her eyes pricking with tears again. She felt Patty join the hug, her arms wrapping around the group and holding them with care and fierce devotion.

Erin’s head slid onto her shoulder, her hand squeezing Holtz’s tightly as she wrapped her free arm around Patty and Abby.

They stood there like that for a long time, just holding each other close. 

Wrapped up in the embrace of her fellow Ghostbusters, Holtz knew she’d finally done it. 

She was safe and loved in a family she trusted completely. She didn’t need to run anymore. 

This queer engineer had found a place to nest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So from a quick google search, I deduced that Holtz may have age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
> 
> Fun fact, people do actually wear yellow-tinted glasses when they suffer from AMD. It’s a vision impairment that makes people sensitive to glare and changes in light and can lead to vision loss if not treated. The yellow glasses help them manage the symptoms which include difficulty adjusting to different levels of light and sensitivity to glare. I wonder if this was the “terminal illness” Holtz spoke of in the DVD extras…
> 
> Another fun fact: people with AMD are not supposed to drive…
> 
> Also Holtz is still a bird nerd because why not? _birder!Holtz_ is my new headcanon.

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah…so I made Holtz a bird nerd in this fic. I needed another quirky hobby for her and birding is mine so why not?


End file.
